Chiaroscuro
by mutedmonologue
Summary: You can only move forward, Hester Asa Moore knew. "And if you do not, they shall find you," she thought, as her dark corners came to light.
1. An Exorcism

_An Exorcism_

The dream came in pieces, like light stealing through the cracks in a door surrounded in darkness. First there were only winter wind's whispers, carrying secondhand strands of distant laughter and the rustling of petticoats. The murmurings crystallized slowly, and girlish voices rang, clear as bells, echoing like the memory of their chiming. "_Sarah…Sarah…" _Her breath grew tight, the sound of the name piercing her through like an arrow. She began to struggle against the vision, for, feeling deftly around the darkness, she knew now what it would show her. It was to no avail; the weight of it pressed all the air out of her lungs. The girls' voices grew closer. Suddenly, the scene was fully illuminated.

_She found herself in a clearing surrounded by trees, sun striking snow into a thousand refracted diamonds. She was momentarily blinded. All alone beneath the blue and pink tinted sunset were three girls in white, barefoot and stripped to their chemises. Hands clasped, twirling in an endless, dizzying circle, a striking girl with black, curly hair and a skinny brunette with a pale splash of freckles beneath her eyes danced. They swung in reckless abandon. The brunette's movements were pure, unhinged energy, the other girl's oddly graceful. They shrieked with laughter. A third girl sat beneath a tree, watching them and laughing softly, restrainedly._

_They cried out to her, voices mingling in vivid harmony. "Come on, Mary!"_

_Mary merely gave them a reserved smile, sifting snow through her fingers like sand through an hourglass, face set in a dreamy expression. The girls' lips moved, but their words were distorted, carried away on the wind._

_In one, quick, fluid motion, the brunette girl pitched forward, letting go of her friend's hand, so she fell into Mary. The two tumbled into a screeching, indignant heap. Mary dusted herself off, gasping with hilarity. Her green eyes flared to life._

_"Grace, charm, and beauty, my darlings. Grace, charm, and beauty." The brunette mocked in a deep, resonant voice. _

_Smiling crookedly, the black-haired girl grabbed her by the leg, pulling until she overbalanced and fell._

_"You were saying, Sarah, dear?" With a flurry of giggling and shrieking, the girls scuffled wildly in the snow, like the playful brawling of young lionesses. Mary, deciding to remain neutral, rushed to the nearest tree and climbed, observing safely from its branches. The black-haired girl finally threw Sarah off of her, and they sprawled there in the snow, panting, cheeks pink. _

_Sarah was the first to move. Climbing vigorously to her feet, she loomed shadowlike above her friend. "Have you died?"_

_She did not answer for some time; her arms and legs stretched, silhouetting a snow angel. The moment froze, and there she was, buried in snow in her white dress, her marble arms and legs bare. Her dark hair streamed about her face like a halo, dappled with snow, which clung to the eyelashes framing her ivory blue eyes. She closed them, and abruptly, the snow in her hair became white poppies, the skin grew wan, and blue, bruised shadows appeared beneath her eyes and cheekbones. She could be sleeping, were she not so still. A snowball hit Sarah in the face, and the moment was shattered. _

_"I am merely summoning a host of rebel angels. We need all the help we can get." The other girl, that dark angel, leapt up, as if winged, resurrected, and marred the snow angel's untouched perfection with her impatience._

_"Yes, yes, come join us Mary! 'Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heav'n!'" Sarah quipped with one of her raw grins._

_"This is hardly Hell," Mary pointed out, but she was smiling._

_Sarah's footprints rent the snow, as she ran to her. She sprang up, grasped a tree branch, and swung from it. The dark-haired girl suddenly stopped laughing. Her eyes glazed over and turned inward, half-closed, something dark and nebulous flickering across her features. Her face contorted in pain. Then her eyes snapped open sharply. She was pale as death, transformed somehow into someone older, hardened, who had seen things she wished she had not. Mutely, she stared at Sarah, who was still dangling from the tree. Mary studied their friend below them on the ground, taking in her strange expression and offered Sarah an arm up. Sarah seemed unperturbed, but there was a worried line creasing Mary's lovely face._

_"Are you all right…?" Mary spoke her name, and it was snuffed out by the wind like a candle._

_"Fine, just fine," she responded, but there was a ragged edge to her voice, as vulnerable as a sleeper's first words after waking from a nightmare. She paused momentarily, then seemingly weightless, she flew across the snow to meet them._

_The vision went blurry at the edges. Pictures flitted across her mind in rapid succession, shaky, as if seen through water. A dead girl in a white pinafore, a creature of shadows, distorted by flames, white flower petals, a dark alleyway, a damp cave, a creature rising from the sea, a teenaged girl with fiery hair, a jeweled dagger, an apple with a bite in it, decay spreading in the white flesh._

And Hester Asa Moore awoke, gasping for breath, clutching at her throat. She untangled herself from the blankets that had twisted around her neck and arms, and her candle sent the room into sharp relief. The thin white scar at the hollow of her throat glowed like a crescent moon. She was surrounded with canvases of nightmare visions, full of teeth and daggers, the wailing of the damned, broken oaths, blood watering the dead grass. The price, in short, of her connection to the Winterlands. In the dark, they came to her. That she was accustomed to. But not this, never this. And so she rose, gathered her paints, and began the exorcism.

She hated herself for what she did next. It was weak and sentimental. It was as stagnant and helpless as painting a still life, painting dead children. They were buried now, in snow and dirt and memory. Best to leave them rest. But nonetheless, she could not stop. _You can only move forward_, she thought, _and if you do not, they shall find you._

There were three girls in her painting. One was beautiful with red-gold hair and transparent green eyes. She smiled shyly, but there were sparks of curiosity clinging to her long eyelashes, a thirst, a need for something indefinable. Leaning on her friend's arm, she gazed dreamily at something no one else could see, out of sight beyond the opposite edge of the canvas. The rest of the world must lie outside those boundaries.

Near the end stood another girl, tall and slender with sharp, bony elbows and a hard, determined jaw. Her full, decided lips curved in a puckish grin, warming her dark brown eyes and hair. Beneath the smile, she looked tense as a cat, poised, ready to spring. Although the painting did not show it, there was an ugly, jagged scar stretching across the base of her neck. Her head was turned away slightly, facing the last girl, between her and the beauty.

And there she was, the focal point of the picture, around which everything revolved. She was shorter than the scarred girl but gave an impression of height. Her face, too intense to be beautiful, was an artist's study in chiaroscuro, heavy shadows carving marble white cheekbones. Her black hair curled wildly, like dark sea foam, pieces brushing the sculpted face, an echo of the shadows. Her features were hardly dainty; her nose was straight and strong, and her chin came to a sharp point beneath long, thin lips. Her eyes were large and almond-shaped, such a dark shade of indigo, they almost matched her hair, the color of water, of bruises. She radiated an ethereal quality, an inhuman gravity. The strange intelligence and mystery in her expression could only be described as "other." Her figure seemed to float rather than stand on the horizon, freedom embodied, but there was a weight in her eyes, an abstraction. She was never meant to stay.

Blue veins traced visibly beneath her translucent skin, a painstaking network of life. The brunette held that porcelain hand in hers, fingers brushing the delicate veins as if warming them. It was here that Hester Asa Moore suddenly touched her paint-splattered fingers to the canvas, the two linked hands. It made a distorted mirror in the center of the room, reflecting the years back at the sad-eyed woman who was once a girl with a wicked smile. Her wildness had congealed into something harsher, circles beneath careworn eyes, rage and insomnia, verging on desperation. The oil paint girls smiled, the curtain behind the canvas rustled in a slight draft. The first fragments of the blue and pink tinted sunrise stole in through the gaps.

"'I am half sick of shadows, said the Lady of Shallot…'" the artist told the empty room. She smiled sadly, hand still resting on the delicate union of illusory hands.


	2. Mirror Images

_Mirror Images_

Still unsatisfied, Miss Moore drew the brush in a final duty dance across the canvas and sighed. Blinking like a woman awakened from a trance, she suddenly realized how weary she was. Morning had broken. The tendrils of light falling on her fingertips were redemptive. She was safe for now.

There was an acrid warmth in her mouth, salty with a harsh metallic aftertaste. She had been biting her lip as she painted. It was a childish habit of hers, one if that many that her days at Spence had failed to cure her of.

_"Really, Miss Rees-Toome, you must put a stop to that unseemly habit. You shall never get a husband that way."_

_"Do you mean by thinking or by biting my lip?" she had countered with scathing innocence._

For it was not frightening away husbands that concerned her, but the fact that her stubborn habit plainly revealed whenever she was concentrating or thinking intently.

"What are you thinking of?" she had asked Sarah on more than one occasion, after taking one look at her face.

"Kindly stop reading my mind," she responded irritably.

The other girl's laugh turned heads, not with its volume, but with its musicality and force. "Why would I ever need to read your mind? I could simply ask, but the fact is that I don't need to." She smiled conspiratorially and tapped her own lips with a pale, blue-veined finger. Both the full bloom of her ironic little mouth and the long caressing fingers summoned a resounding and mysterious ache within Sarah that made her wish that she couldn't read her so effortlessly. As her friend laughed further at her perplexity, Sarah noticed that her eyes were drawn to the delicate cords in the hollow of her throat, musical, poetic, and all at once as poignant as a string orchestra, the thin lines snaking from a charcoal pencil, the fragile thread of life, so easily torn, but for its time, so full of passion and power and hilarity and…

…blood. It flowed from her split lip and diverted the tributaries of her memory. This was the sole victim of her tension while she had painted the girls. She licked the blood from her lips until a drunken dizziness pounded like its own organ in her head. Despite her efforts, the blood dripped morbidly down her chin. _Bloodthirsty, _she thought wryly._ That's what they must call me, and I'm afraid they must be right. _If they could only see her now, surely, all their suspicions for the worst would be confirmed.

She rose painfully, body brittle with inaction after being set in the same bent position all the sleepless night. Her back protested loudly with a spine-wrenching crack that reminded her, like everything else, that she was growing no younger. She was exhausted, yet she could not rest. She was running out of time.

After emptying the red, diluted water from her washbasin out the window, she gave a small, stoical shudder and surveyed herself in the mirror. It seemed that, for one more morning at least, she was still there. She was almost surprised to see her familiar features were still indisputably human, if haggard. If she had instead seen the reflection of one of her garishly painted masks there, she would have gasped, but she would not have been surprised.

But, no. Her large, slanted brown eyes pushed back their heavy hoods with effort, and her thin face was girlish beneath the faint yet unmistakable carvings of age. The eyes made her look foreign, some said. The face was rather horsy, but lively, charming, a face that inspired instant and unconditional trust. _Poor bastards,_ she thought with a numb sort of twinge. There were purple pools of sleeplessness etched beneath her strange, warm eyes. They reminded her of someone—saw her in her mind's eye, the tongues of flame from her candle licking at her features in the dark, as she laid in bed, awake and rigid.

_"I don't sleep."_

Miss Moore pushed the thought away as she pulled her hair from her face and pinned it at the nape of her neck with more force than was absolutely necessary. It was strange to be back here, with so many ghosts. Was this all a penance? She often wondered. She dabbed lilac water on her wrists and the base of her throat. The effect was funereal; she could still smell the blood stench it sought to conceal.

Breathing deeply through her mouth, she concentrated again on her reflection, but she could not meet her eyes. She averted them instead to her figure, hopelessly boyish and angular even in womanhood. Sinewy muscles, compact bones, and rather large hands. She loosened her corset and put on her dress, glancing away as the high collar hid her neck in a rapid flash of fabric. It was obviously necessary, but she resented that it made her look like a woman who should be teaching at a stagnant, girls' finishing school, oh so prim. The high collar clashed with her smile.

Moving aside books and papers, Miss Moore retrieved a brooch from her small, crowded desk and pinned it at her throat. It comforted her to have more than a flimsy layer of fabric between her scar and the world. Hastily, she covered the canvases of depraved beasts and innocent young women, cast her eyes around the room one last time, composed her expression, and strode through the door and into the halls of the Spence Academy for Young Ladies. By the stairs, she met Polly LeFarge, the French teacher.

"Good morning, Miss Moore," she said cordially.

"Ah, good morning."

"I take it you slept well."

"Yes, very well, thank you," Miss Moore lied compulsively. Madame LeFarge's round, honest face and unaffected cheer made her feel unusually guilty. She reminded her of someone she had once known. Madame LeFarge talked easily and banally, ever undisturbed by her silence, as they entered the Great Hall.

And there, Miss Moore felt her throat constrict in shock. Mary was sitting alone at one of the tables. Her bright head was bowed over a small leather-bound book in a characteristic posture of self-conscious contemplation, almost prayerful in aspect. She raised her quietly penetrating green eyes, but she did not acknowledge Miss Moore. As soon as she saw the girl's face, she realized her foolishness. This, of course, was not Mary. The stubborn set of her jaw would have betrayed the illusion immediately, even if she had not met Gemma Doyle the previous night. At the time, Miss Moore had been too stunned by the family resemblance to do anything but observe that, although she looked like Mary, she did not act like her. This was a shame. She knew how to manipulate her mother. Had known. But then, the mother would be Miss Doyle's Achilles heel. _Her mother. Mary. No, Virginia Doyle. Virginia Doyle to me now and forever. _

The burning hatred that rose within her seared away all barriers, and a cold rationality settled over her mind. She saw her objective. She knew what she must do. Her heart skipped a beat as it transitioned from the staccato of panic to a satisfied purr. This was not Mary. It was her daughter. And that meant only one thing.

"Miss Moore. Miss Moore, are you quite all right?" Polly LeFarge was forgiving but no fool. Although she had had years of practice, Miss Moore had never fully mastered the art of hiding her emotions. She was simply not made to be a master and trying was an endless battle against the foundations of her nature. And clearly, her glazed expression had not gone unnoticed for long.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I was only asking if you knew of our new student, Miss Gemma Doyle. She arrived late last night. But you didn't look at all as if you had heard."

"I'm dreadfully sorry," said Miss Moore. "It's just that I've remembered something that I intended to do."

* * *

A/N: Yes, I know. An update years later. As Dennis R. Miller once said, "Life is what happens to a writer between drafts." I wish it were so, but for me, drafts are still what happen to me between life and life-permitting. I think for now that I am still wedged comfortably in this limbo between fragments of life, so expect more soon. And more exposition. Lots of it.


	3. How We Burn

_How We Burn_

Miss Moore found the class photograph first. Her case was still packed and latched. She didn't even take off her hat. Her traveling cloak transformed her into a thing of the shadows she roamed, searching for the past before even announcing her presence. After arriving at Spence by night after twenty years of absence, she paced the halls like the ghost who had never left. Unannounced and unseen, she could have been ghost, memory, imagination, even what she said she was—a teacher. She knew it was morbid, but it was somehow essentially important that she find the picture. It disturbed her that they had hidden all evidence that she was once here. The ruined East Wing stood—fell—in memoriam, but a simple picture was more than the faint-hearted ladies of Spence could reasonably stomach.

It was just as well. She found the 1871 class photograph almost as quickly as she would have had it been displayed on the wall with the rest. Twenty years later, Spence was still stiflingly predictable. Aptly, Eugenia Spence's portrait was the picture's keeper. The memory of the dead was just one more secret that had died with her. The photograph looked like it too had perished in the fire, warped into waves, so much like the rise and fall of flames.

Miss Moore saw herself first. Even if she could discern the blurred features, she wouldn't have recognized herself. Her face was turned sharply to the right, mouth stretched in laughter. The picture was bent so that her past self obscured what she had been looking at then. She smoothed it out. The names at the bottom flashed before her eyes: _Millicent Jenkins, Susanna Meriweather, Anna Nelson,_ _Sarah Rees-Toome… _The meaning of the next two names struck her before she read the words themselves. A lump formed in her throat. Although the stairway was cold, her forehead and chest were aflame with a torrid pulse. She intentionally screwed up her eyes so that the letters blurred into a million blurry anagrams. Before her traitorous eyes darted to their faces, she abruptly folded the picture again. All she could see now was herself_. _Breathing hard, she assured herself that the reason for her averted eyes was that she simply didn't need to see the other girls. Their smiles were burned into her memory.

Even the murderer must have some respect for the dead.

"'Ello? 'Ooh's there?" Heart pounding as subtly as a scream in the empty corridor, Miss Moore hastily stuffed the damaged picture behind another, unscalded year of rosy-cheeked schoolgirls, the Class of 1872. The speaker's candle preceded her around the corner. Miss Moore could have laughed when she saw her—the ungainly housekeeper Brigid, almost comically unchanged after all these years. With the hand that did not hold the candle, she clutched her rosary, eyes fluttering, mouth and fingers moving wildly. Miss Moore's only thought on the matter was of the likelihood that she would burn herself in the process of praying for deliverance from the fires of hell. The girlish version of her wanted nothing better than to sneak up and grab Brigid from behind. But here, her amusement was unfortunately second to her inconspicuousness.

So, she settled for a whispered, "It's only me."

She allowed Brigid a quavery, "'Ooh? 'Ooh is it?" and another frantic pawing of her rosary before she stepped into the light.

"Miss Hester Asa Moore at your service. I've just arrived, and I'm afraid I've lost my way to the headmistress's office."

"Oh, the new drawing teacher. You gave ol' Brigid a dreadful fright. Just come from lighting the fires fer the night. No rest fer the weary."

The housekeeper drew closer and the full radiance of the small candle flooded Miss Moore's face. Brigid squinted at her for longer than was polite. Miss Moore worried that, against all reason, she had recognized her. There was skepticism in Brigid's creased brow.

But she only asked, rather rudely, "What're y_ou_ 'ere fer?"

Miss Moore controlled her relief. It was not an uncommon question. She was noticeably too attractive to be teaching at a finishing school. Never beautiful, but certainly not physically offensive enough to evade a husband, whatever her means. And Brigid, for all her complaints about her failing vision, was perceptive. Miss Moore was irrationally certain that the glint in her eyes unmistakably marked her as an imposter. But blind or astute, Brigid did not know her.

Searching for an adequate response to her question, Miss Moore glanced first at the hidden photograph spreading its destruction to the following year and then over Brigid's shoulder at the remains of the East Wing.

"I am here to teach."

* * *

Once inside Mrs. Nightwing's office, Miss Moore sat with her spine rigid and her mind elsewhere, as her former teacher introduced herself and proceeded to tell her more information that she already knew. It was incredible how the old ingrained routines and rules could awake with the slightest prod, after being dormant for years in some back corner of her mind. Although perhaps the rules had never been there in the first place. So little had changed. She was almost disappointed. Even the room itself was covered in the same printed peacock feather wallpaper that had been there in Eugenia's days. It had suited Eugenia, but enclosing prim Mrs. Nightwing, it seemed gaudy.

"Welcome to Spence Academy, Miss Moore," she said with about as much warmth as a prayer echoed back hollowly in the cavernous dome of a stony chapel smothered with funereal flowers. _Welcome back_.

There could have been a common corset for conversations such as this, which tightened and pulled and shaped any two people's words into the same polite evasions. When Mrs. Nightwing spoke, it was with the anonymity of a true master.

"I trust you had a pleasant journey." _Perhaps a longer one that you might expect, _she thought. How many times she had heard these words before.

_Her sister's husband, Mr. Henry Ackworth, took a draw on his cigar, expelling smoke through his mouth. Sarah coughed. She would have hoped that he would be more sensitive about this, considering the circumstances of her presence. _Oh, yes, _she answered him in her head_, it was long, lonely, morbid, and made entirely against my will. A pleasant journey, indeed. _She did not respond aloud. Grief had poured all her emotions from her and then turned her inward. Besides, it seemed almost insulting to answer such a trite question, and unnecessary. He wasn't asking to be answered. He was asking to ask. She only nodded stoically. _

_He kept talking, but Sarah wasn't listening. The lit, curling end of the cigar in his hand called forth imagery terrible enough to mesmerize her. It was red and inflamed, like the inside of the body. She longed to touch it, simply to know how it must have felt—to be consumed by it. She longed to know if, unlike her past, she could survive it._

_She did not see him move from his chair and smother the flame in an ashtray. The fire raged on in her mind. She did not even sense him beside her, until he brushed her cheek with his hand, turning her face to his. He was a handsome man, her sister's husband, but his ruddy face and emaciated blue eyes, which never met hers, repulsed her. She let out a small noise of protest; she hated to be touched. _

_"There, there," he murmured softly. His hand took her teardrops with it as he pulled it away from her face. She realized that she had been crying. His hand came to rest instead on her shoulder. Her dress, as ever too big for her willowy figure, slid down one arm, exposing her flesh to his touch. His comforting hand could have singed her._

_Emma made her appearance then, silhouetted in the parlor doorway. People often wondered that they were sisters. With her ashy blond hair and transparent eyelashes exposing transparent grey eyes, Emma was the very picture of delicacy—or of indecision. Sarah was taller, although several years younger, with a square jaw and unequivocally brown eyes and hair. Emma wore a fine dress, but although she was beautiful enough to surpass the fabric, it overwhelmed her in some indefinable way. She seemed to be frowning detachedly, but it was difficult to tell because her eyebrows were indiscernible from her pale skin._

_Emma took one look at her husband's caressing hand and her sister's hastily blotted tears and said, in her nervous voice, "Shall we look into finding a finishing school?"_

_Mr. Ackworth patted Sarah rather hard on the shoulder and withdrew his hand, his eyes never leaving his wife. He said hurriedly, perfunctorily, "I am sorry for your loss." _

_"Thank you," Sarah murmured quietly to Eugenia Spence months later. Sarah sat uncomfortably on the edge of a chair in the headmistress's office, feeling her mourning weeds chafe the backs of her legs. It was her first day at Spence Academy, and so far, the stone structure with its ugly gargoyles seemed uninviting. The endless rules and routines Mrs. Spence had just detailed were even more grim, in Sarah's opinion, but this unexpected piece of kindness was, in its way, something much worse. Sarah had heard the words many times since the fire, but this time, they were infused with an odd sincerity, almost motherly. It made her feel uncomfortable, her vulnerability suffused with a mixture of gratefulness and guilt for her inability to repay it. She loathed being pitied, resented her own need._

_Sarah starred into her lap, folding and unfolding her hands, as the degradation of tears threatened. Mrs. Spence, however, surprised her again. She had the rare power of commanding attention effortlessly and met her downcast eyes levelly. Sarah noticed that, beneath her spectacles, the headmistress's eyes were damp. "I know that losing both of one's parents is an awfully heavy burden for anyone, and particularly for one so young. How old are you again, my child?"_

_Sarah balked at her gentle sympathy. It was too much, too effusive. Unreasonably, it made her distrust Eugenia Spence. Nevertheless, Sarah managed a composed, clipped response."Fifteen, ma'am. I will be sixteen in October."_

_Mrs. Spence lifted her frames on her nose and studied Sarah piercingly, then she shook her head and sighed. "So young. You shall be in the first class, with my ward, Isabelle. I am sure she will be eager to assist you as you become accustomed to Spence. Have you any formal schooling, dear?"_

_"No, Mrs. Spence. My mother used to teach me. She didn't believe in finishing schools."_

_Sarah bit her lip in resistance against the sudden lump in her throat, as the simple statement conjured her mother, frowning fiercely at the pages of an open book and giving her daughters no other alternatives to learning to think for themselves. And it was impossible to say no to her when she was like that, when her catlike eyes flashed and her stubborn jaw jutted. Even when Emma summoned the uncharacteristic courage to marry Mr. Ackworth against her mother's wishes, it was with great hesitancy and remorse and much argument. No daughters of Harriet Rees-Toome, who had not so much as surrendered her maiden name, were to marry wealthy fools or to be groomed for such futures at any finishing school._

_Mrs. Spence only smiled kindly and said, "Oh, is that so? There is no need for such concern here. And please, call me Eugenia. I believe not only in educating my ladies, but also in ensuring that they will feel at home at Spence. Please, never hesitate to come to me for any reason. My door is always open. Miss Rees-Toome, I am—_

"… certain you shall find Spence to your liking," Mrs. Nightwing concluded their meeting brusquely. In her first hours as a new teacher at Spence, Miss Moore managed to keep the sullen girl who had sat in her place twenty years ago from surfacing. Nonetheless, she couldn't escape her scornful scrutiny here. _You've returned? _Her youthful self demanded to know._ Of your own volition? _

Despite her distaste, Miss Moore patiently taught at Spence for long months so uneventful that she almost forgot that she was not what she claimed to be. But only almost. The woman who was Sarah Rees-Toome never forgot her first arrival, the one that started it all, one irrevocable choice after another.

But now, she had met her chance to outlive her past, to finally move backwards in time. Gemma Doyle had endured the same meeting in the drafty room, the same empty platitudes and irrelevant apologies, the same motherless vulnerability. And Miss Moore knew exactly how to use that. She spoke the language; she knew where the internal damage hid and what would ignite the injuries and draw them to the surface. A fire could start with the strike of a single match on a rough, wounded surface. _This will be easy, _she thought. And within her, sadness and satisfaction fought for control of her painfully curved mouth. _Far too easy._

* * *

A/N: A thousand thanks to everyone who has read and reviewed this story. Simply knowing people are reading keeps me going, even through the portions of my plot that either resemble swiss cheese, or are entirely nonexistent. Your kind words and insights are crack for the writer, yet also entirely legal. So, in other words, ideal. Thank you.


	4. Curses

_Curses_

"Do you believe in curses, Miss Moore?"

Miss Moore suffered an inward tremor of shock, a lurid string of her bloody midnight visions, the memories of wet indigo eyes and familiar faces vacant in death, and an implacable urge to strangle Felicity Worthington.

That girl was a thorn in her side. She always had the unsettling habit of asking the most dangerous question at the worst possible moment, always with a charming smile. In other words, she was too much like Miss Moore herself for comfort. Or at least she was like someone else, someone she was once. Regardless, it took one to know one, and Miss Moore could say with some assurance that Miss Worthington's smile was pure challenge beneath a thin, protective shroud of innocence. She was so saucy, so rebellious, and so undiscriminating in her choice of targets. She was a warship that had forgotten its purpose of peace and learned to thrive instead on the shots it fired, the war itself. She could strike a friend as easily as a foe that way. For, she never thought of why she acted. She merely acted. What she ever like that? Miss Moore wondered. She knew she probably was. But although one can only move forward, if there is one small, evasive way to move backwards, it is called hypocrisy.

Sometimes, she forgot what she had been as a girl, what she was. The teacher had begun to believe the lies she taught. The actress had started to believe her own performance. She found she liked to teach. The wide-eyed innocence of her students, the reverence of those girls in starched white dresses-- they would believe anything she told them. She could choose to teach them to do what she could not, but the choice was hers. That was power in itself. But it was a slim substitute for the power she had lost, and a simple reminder could bring the illusion crashing down. She would remember, and that was the true curse. She could not forget.

Miss Moore stared at her still lifes. The rich red of the apples outshone the mouth of shadow stretched around them, eternally tantalizing and never changing. The fruit of knowledge, that highest of sins.

She opened her mouth. "I believe…"

_"What happens to the Lady of Shallot?" _

_Smiling, little Nell Hawkins tilted her head and widened her ingenuous eyes, a posture that rendered her features even more doll-like than ever. After she studied the sketch for some time, Nell's high, clear voice cut through the air like a single triangle through an orchestra. Her forehead was wrinkled with the strain of a young child who sees something she does not comprehend, but her voice was steady._

_"Since she never left the safety of her tower, that was all she knew. She died because she was innocent. She couldn't be prepared for death. The Lady of Shallot knew nothing of curses." _

_The other girls shifted uncomfortably in their seats, the rustling of their skirts an echo of their whispers. Miss Moore understood. Hearing such heavy truths in Nell's breathy, girlish voice was unsettling._

_"Very good, Miss Hawkins."_

_And then Nell was screaming, lying in a heap before the darkness on the horizon, which drew closer and closer. Her limbs were tangled like a rag doll tossed carelessly into a corner. A strand of hair stuck to her forehead, moist with terror. Some forgotten part of Miss Moore wanted to brush it from her face._

_"Please. Not this one," she begged._

_The terrible voice tore the air. "I demand a sacrifice."_

_"Run, Nell!" she shouted. Her throat was raw with the effort. It seemed to have shrunk with hopelessness. "Keep it out of your mind!"_

_Miss Moore did not stay to see what became of Nell Hawkins. She, too, was running. The creature would have its sacrifice, and after all these years, it would not be her. She ran against the will of the wind, and she did not look back. The sound of her own breathing, the thundering heart that reassured her she lived, drowned out the cries behind her._

_The last time she saw Nell Hawkins, she was stumbling up the hill. Her tiny legs pumped frantically. Her sweet voice rasped hysterically, "Jack and Jill went up the hill." She fell and tore her skirt. "Jack and Jill went up the hill…" The creature set upon her. "Jack and Jill…" Even as the tracker drew its ugly face to hers in a lascivious smile of red teeth, she clutched her arms to her small, birdlike chest and held the words of the child's rhyme against her pounding heart. Nell Hawkins was never to let curses penetrate her mind. She was innocent to the end._

A sudden breeze overturned a cup of brushes, bringing Miss Moore back to her senses. She had taken the wind to be part of her vision. She closed the window and righted the brushes. Her thoughts proved harder to rearrange. They never let her forget for too long.

And if she could not forget, she could not change. She could only move forward, deeper into the pact that had trapped her. She was doomed to forever travel the same course in delirious pursuit of what she had wanted years ago. _Pulled by the current after a dream._ Now, she did not crave the power half as much as the vindication. If only she got the thing that had been taken from her, perhaps it would reverse everything, surrender everything she had lost on the road to getting it back. But most of all, she knew that getting what she had wanted was the only thing that could finally set her free.

Miss Moore straightened the already rigid brushes and addressed her class.

"I believe… that this week we shall take a walk through the woods and explore the old caves, where there are some truly astonishing primitive drawings. They can tell you far more about art than I can."

_And you, I hope, can tell me what I need to know._Miss Moore glanced at Gemma Doyle. She played with the silver chain around her neck and stared out the window. Her expression was unreadable. Miss Moore had no way of knowing what Miss Doyle knew about her past. Nothing, she presumed. Mary was always a cheerful escape artist, never one to remember anything unpleasant. She had that beautiful flaw that Miss Moore had always lacked—the all-consuming need to be thought well of, and above all else, to be loved. Mary would never want her daughter to know what she had done. Nonetheless, perhaps Gemma was the one-- the key to the Realms. So far, however, Miss Doyle was as silent and unresponsive as Mary in her deepest state of brooding. The caves, however, were certainly a start. They were rich in Order lore. If nothing else, Miss Doyle's curiosity would give her away, if she had anything to hide. If not, well, she had faced disappointment before.

She turned back to the girls, and an unnamed anxiety set upon her. It was fear in its purest form, causeless and senseless. She needed to be alone. Miss Moore released the class to cheers and felt a vague stirring of happiness that there were, in fact, spirits within these stagnant young ladies in the making. However, her inexplicable restlessness persisted. She felt as if she should be doing something else right now. She had forgotten something immensely important, and it disturbed her. Something was missing.

"As for this," she said, scrutinizing her sketch, "it needs something." She was not sure exactly what she meant.

So Miss Moore drew a neat mustache on the Lady of Shallot, caricaturing the poor, cursed woman. Irreverence made her more manageable. With that simple addition, she changed from ingénue to villain—or fool. Miss Moore's face warmed with a smile. In that moment, she was more girl than woman, and the young ladies of Spence appreciated her cheek. She had done it again, against her better judgment. She had exposed that dangerous thing, her spirit.

And her weakness, too, she feared. As she laughed to chase away any demon, she could see that familiar mirror-pale face studying her from the corners of memory, dark eyebrows arched skeptically, just as they had any time Sarah had jested in order to hide. That familiar, smoky voice blew transient, illusory mist in her ear. _What's wrong?_

Miss Moore turned away from her creation, conscious of every muscle that held her smile. "God is in the details," she said, almost to herself, almost to the endless worlds of unknowing girls, whose reflections in the window passed her one by one.

* * *

A/N: Portions of the dialogue in this chapter are direct quotes from _A Great and Terrible Beauty _and _Rebel Angels._ So now would probably be as good of a time as any to say that I don't own anything that belongs to Libba Bray or, in this chapter, Tennyson. But that only makes sense, because if it belonged to me, it wouldn't belong to Libba Bray, and this story would not belong on a fanfiction site. However, everything here that doesn't belong to anyone else belongs to me. And, in case you were wondering, the next chapter will be long.


	5. Windows Into the Past

_Windows into the Past_

_"'And moving through a mirror clear/That hangs before her all the year/Shadows of the world appear,'"_ a few of the younger girls lilted, as Miss Moore led them back to Spence. She couldn't help smiling. There was something simultaneously humorous and terrible about their lack of comprehension of the true meaning of the words. It was only a poem they'd had to memorize, a lark. They sounded so cheerful; they giggled. One had a lopsided crown of flowers in her hair. In their uncomfortably unquestioning adoration, they fought for her attention. "Miss Moore, Miss Moore," cried the shrill little pixie voices in chorus. On another occasion, she might have indulged them out of pure discomfort tinged with amusement, but at the moment, Miss Moore's attention was otherwise engaged.

She was watching Gemma Doyle and Felicity Worthington climb the hill behind them. They cut quite a contrast—the tall, awkward redhead and the tiny, domineering blonde. They looked innocent enough, congenial and conspiratorial. But Miss Moore knew better. Their arms were linked in the attitude only schoolgirls seemed capable of, as if they were a unified entity remote from the rest of the world. But they strained away from each other, necks turned and veined in the controlled intensity of dancers. They were not friends but partners in the elaborate waltz of the perilous allegiances of girls. Every step was a small cruelty followed by a polite evasion. Who knew what secrets were locked inside those locked arms, what words were truly on the intently smiling lips.

Their appearance was preceded by a splash, much screaming, and inevitably, the distinctive tones of Mrs. Nightwing, which although unintelligible, balanced on the sharp edge between stern and concerned. Even from a distance, Miss Moore could see that Felicity's hair and clothes dripped visibly. No doubt she had made an excursion into the lake. Miss Moore wondered what mischief was afoot, what dainty viciousness hid in this petty exchange between young ladies. Some things simply didn't change. The stabbing of subtle knives between female friends was one thing that could be trusted to remain constant. But there were other things, too—the wildness and the laughter, the lack of restraint and of obligation, the protective ignorance that proudly wore a worldly face, and the staunch conviction that they were significant. Miss Moore remembered these sentiments with longing and bitterness. They were every bit as imagined as misty dream figures. The moment the sleeper's eyes were opened, skepticism and cynicism took over, and they were gone. And once gone, they could not be called back.

_With her back turned, the girl strode purposefully away from where the others sat sewing and socializing. The wind tore at her hair and the billowing skirt of her dress, but she did not seem to care. Her skirt sashayed against her immovable body. Sarah was immediately drawn to her, her separateness. It was a more than a physical disconnect, somehow. She saw the way the other girls looked up from their needles surreptitiously from time to time, faces tinged with uncertain envy when they caught upon her proud, retreating figure. Hers was an isolation of choice._

_"We like to encourage our young ladies to occupy themselves during their free period, or to simply get some much-needed fresh air," Mrs. Spence was telling her. She was only half-listening. "Education, I believe, is much more than discipline. It is also freedom, finding solace in the company of others."_

_Mrs. Spence nodded at the circle of girls stretched on the grass, chattering over their sewing. Their snappish, disconnected motions reminded Sarah of the suspicious pecking of hens. One girl, however, stood out from the rest. It was not only her luminous red-gold hair or that distinguished her, just as the retreating girl's distance was not what set her apart. Her hands moved with the fluidity of water. She followed the thread of the conversation and laughed merrily, the most tender, innocent sound, like the tinkling of glass. However, her eyes were dreamy. She hardly seemed aware of what she was doing. Without breaking the flow of her needlework, her long eyelashes stretched up, revealing inquisitive doe's eyes of the palest green. She was delicately, simply beautiful. Noticing Sarah, she smiled. It was an unaffected smile, indiscriminate, unquestioning. It was the smile of someone who has never been hurt and does not expect to be._

_"Ladies, I would like you to meet Sarah Rees-Toome," Mrs. Spence said, smiling at the girls. "She will be joining us for the remainder of the term, and I know you will make her feel welcome." The girls glanced briefly at her, but the green-eyed girl held her gaze calmly. Mrs. Spence introduced them individually, but Sarah was uninterested, until Mrs. Spence nodded at the redhead and said, "This is Mary Dowd."_

_Mary rose gracefully, if timidly, and said, "How do you do." Her voice was quietly sincere, and her smile was warm._

_"She will be one of your roommates here at Spence," Eugenia Spence continued, "along with my ward, Miss Isabelle Harris." Her eyes swept the circle of girls, searching. A slight frown creased her brow. She wore it as unnaturally as Sarah wore a ball gown. Mrs. Spence lifted her glasses on her nose, as if hoping that her vision deceived her. "Where is she now?" she sighed, seemingly to herself._

_Mary shrugged helplessly and gestured at the girl receding into the horizon. Mrs. Spence simply shook her head. "She only knows why," she murmured. _

_"I told her not to go, Mrs. Spence," said a pinched little pixie of a girl. "She's gone quite far. She'll be late for vespers for sure."_

_"Isabelle!" Mrs. Spence called, echoes resounding across the grounds in a collision of syllables. "Isabelle!"_

_But the girl moved forward against the wind, shoulders erect, to meet the swaying trees in the forest. _

_"Well, I suppose you will have to become acquainted later," Mrs. Spence said, eyebrows furrowed. "In the meanwhile, I hope you shall enjoy your time here, and will not hesitate to come to Mary or I with any questions." With a jovial wave, she left Sarah there, standing in the glaring sunlight before the broken ring of disinterested girls. They scrutinized her in an exaggerated silence, and abruptly went back to talking among themselves. Mary smiled apologetically and moved over slightly in offering, but the fearful charity in the gesture merely infuriated her. She would not join them._

_"Pleasure to meet you too. Charmed, I'm sure," Sarah intoned sardonically and turned on her heel, cutting herself free of them of her own volition. It was preferable to the alternative. She would suffer for her rudeness later, but all that concerned Sarah now was being alone. Once out of sight, she broke into a run. She had no objective, but it was an act of rebellion against her restrictive uniform and everyone behind her. Gasping furiously and clutching her side, she was forced to stop. Disregarding her white skirt, she sat on the cool ground beside the lake. The tears rose from the old wound, but she pushed them back irritably. She had caught sight of the girl she had seen earlier. Isabelle, she presumed. Where was she going, and was it better than where they had come from? Her curiosity rooted her to the spot. _

_Although she was too far away to have heard or otherwise sensed her presence, Isabelle turned her head and looked directly at her. It was as if she knew she was being watched. As she looked back at Sarah, the girl's black curls whipped across her angled face. Her smile was haughty, mocking. She seemed to know what was in her mind. Strangely, Sarah felt more welcome under her knowing, faintly contemptuous gaze than she had felt anywhere at Spence so far. _

_The wind whipped, rattling the trees. Unmoved, the girl did not brush the hair from her face. Rather, she threw her head powerfully forward, as if the weather was too trivial a reason to lift a hand. As she disappeared behind the trees, every individual lock of hair sprang back into place. It was as if the wind had never touched her._

_Drawn by a hunger she could not explain, Sarah followed her. After some time, she saw a white skirt swish around a bend, but when Sarah stepped into the clearing, the girl was gone. There was no evidence she had been there, and no other path she could have taken. What looked to be caves blocked off all other escapes, and try as she might, Sarah could not find an opening in the weathered rock faces. It was like chasing the stars. More intrigued than ever, Sarah returned reluctantly to the circle of girls._

_Mary saw her coming and excused herself from her tittering friends. She met Sarah halfway and took her hand._

_"Come," she said in her soft voice, "and I will show you our room."_

_"I believe I've seen enough," Sarah countered, but she allowed herself to fall into stride with Mary. As soon as they were out of earshot, Mary spoke, the words tumbling out in a rush, as if rehearsed._

_"Don't think too harshly of them. It's just that they're afraid of change."_

_"Is that so? Well, if they consider me 'change,' then they are uncommonly astute. Are you?"_

_"Am I what?"_

_"Afraid of change?"_

_"No," Mary said, sounding caught off-guard. Her incredibly long dreamer's eyelashes fluttered in surprise at her own candor. "No, not at all. I think I long for it. I imagine what it's like sometimes—different places, the rest of the world. Perhaps, perhaps… I want to see it all someday."_

_"Really. I want to own it." Sarah unsheathed her most charming grin._

_Mary's eyes widened in surprise. She didn't seem to know whether or not to take her seriously. The expression was so comical, Sarah enjoyed it for a moment before smiling. Mary looked at her uncertainly, then began to laugh with guilty abandon, enjoying Sarah's boldness against her better judgment. _

_As the heavy front doors of the school building slammed shut behind them, their laughter seemed as harsh as an invading sacrilege in the quiet corridor. Noticing, Mary composed herself quickly, but Sarah's defiant hilarity spilled across the white marble stairs like drops of crimson paint. Mary remained silent, until they stopped in a hallway of nondescript doors. She opened the door closest to the stairs and waited for Sarah to follow. _

_"Here we are," Mary pronounced unnecessarily._

_From what Sarah could see through the half-open doors across the hall, their room seemed to be larger than the rest, accommodating three beds rather than two. One was clearly Mary's—awash in flowered sheets, crocheted blankets, and neatly stitched samplers coyly proclaiming, "Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Gentleness, and Self-Control—The Fruits of the Spirit" and "Charity suffereth long and is kind." Sarah personally saw no reason that Charity should continue to be charitable or kind, should it have to suffer for it. What was really noticeable, however, about Mary's side of the room was the pile of books. Neatly stacked beneath her pious little bed were penny papers and atlases, indulgent fantastical trash and dog-eared classics. When Sarah passed the bed, she noticed a long ink stain poisoning a sedentary garden of the print flowers. _

_The second bed, closest to the window, gave no sign of habitation apart from the generic schoolbooks tossed dispassionately on top of it. There was an odd method to the disorder, as if the owner had spent painstaking minutes arranging the books so that no two corners pointed in the same direction. The bed itself could have belonged to anyone. There were no personal touches. There was only a fading indentation in the sheets on the side facing the window, which was open. The texts and papers on the faded desk fluttered in the breeze._

_Mary pushed the window shut and crossed the room to the third, unoccupied bed. "There is a closet here where you may hang your things and a screen for dressing. And you may want to hurry, because it is almost time for vespers." She was all manners and distance again._

_They dressed in silence, occasionally pausing to assist each other with the bindings of their garments. Even as she tightened Sarah's corset, Mary averted her eyes modestly, looking embarrassed. Her own figure, a flawless hourglass, barely needed the corset. She wore it with the innocence of one who does not realize her body is beautiful. This made her embarrassment contagious, and Sarah, too, tried not to look at either Mary or herself, as the laces of her corset methodically drew more breath out of her body. _

_Sarah finally clutched her ribs and said, in a constricted voice, "Mercy. Any tighter and I will be visiting the Creator through a more direct route than vespers."_

_A small spasm trembled over Mary's lips, as she resisted a smile. "I hope her Self-Control is feeding her Spirit," Sarah thought. _

_Mary was already halfway down the stairs. "Come on," she called softly._

_Sarah had barely reached the retreating blue cape when another girl came up the staircase in the opposite direction. She walked briskly but never gave the appearance of hurrying. She moved her head from side to side, taking in every detail of her surroundings without curiosity. There was haughty, disinterested appraisal in her eyes. Her head turned for a moment on the landing, and Sarah immediately recognized her as the girl from earlier. _

_"Oh, there you are," Mary said to the girl. "Isabelle, this is Sarah Rees-Toome, our new roommate."_

_Sarah's first observation was that Isabelle Harris was not a beautiful girl. Her features were all harsh, cutting lineaments and her complexion was as colorless as glass. The contrast of the light, fragile skin and the dark, intense eyes was as jarring as that of ink on paper. It was like staring simultaneously at both faces of the moon. Not an ugly face, rather, an inhuman one. There was an apple in her clenched hand. The red of its flesh was lurid against her white hand. _

_"Well, hello," Isabelle said, the faintly derisive smile stretching her mouth. She spoke as if it was she who had been waiting for Sarah, and not the other way around. "I believe we've met."_

_In the few words, her voice was an unlimited vocabulary of contradictory tones. It rasped like the skin of an apple tearing under teeth and stung like the silky sweet fruit beneath. _

_Sarah studied her in bemusement, and her mouth was open, rounding a question, when Mary interrupted._

_"Where have you been, Isa?"_

_"Wandering," Isabelle pronounced crisply. "I find it opens many…doors, shall we say."_

_Her inflections were rich with enigmatic implications, but Sarah judged from Mary's blank look that she understood as little as she did. _

_"You'll be late for certain."_

_Isabelle arched an eyebrow and stepped leisurely around them. "Then I will meet you there." She slipped through the half-open door to their room without so much as disrupting the hinges and was gone._

_As they continued on their way to the chapel, all Sarah could think to say was, "Who is she?"_

_"Isabelle?" Mary asked. "But you've just met her."_

_"No, I mean… what is she like?"_

_Mary thought for a moment. "Oh, well, she's practically a sister to me—kind, virtuous, and frightfully clever. She is…" She stopped, frowning. "She's…" Mary grinned sheepishly. "Difficult to explain."_

_"I see that."_

_They lapsed into silence. Sarah allowed the soft patter of their steps to serve as their only conversation. She abhorred contriving light chatter, and Mary did not take the reins either. And so they walked, side by side yet separate, until they reached the chapel. _

_When the oak doors swung open, accosting them with thick musty air, the first thing they saw was Isabelle, standing behind the pews, dark head bent piously over a hymnal. But when she glanced up at them, at Sarah, her face was at direct odds with her folded hands. Her eyes were too bright and her curled mouth too raw. Even kneeling beneath the chapel's formidable altar and endless rafters, even encased in polished wood and muffled footsteps, she could have been standing in the clearing by the caves, head thrown back in mirth._

Isabelle was laughing at her now. Miss Moore could almost see the scorn curling her lips, as she watched her enter the clearing as a stranger and introduce schoolgirls to the place that had cast her out. _Careful, this ravine's a bit tricky. Seems to come out of nowhere and then you're falling and breaking your neck._ Advice from the expert. The teachings of one who could not do, one who fell. _Careful._ She was a guide and not a creator of this museum of ancient cave drawings. This temple belonged to others,_ women who had power. _She was merely a visitor. She may bleed, but her blood was not wanted here, ornamental and poignant on the sympathetically damp walls. Others would tell the story, draw her for posterity beneath the flickering candles. And she would not be the heroine. If she was remembered at all, that is.

Isabelle's derisive smile flashed through her mind, the arrogant face of the girl who never grew old. She never lived to see her body lose its beauty and her power fade like primitive goddesses weathered by rain. She laughed at Miss Moore, immortalized and youthful in memory, with smooth lips and the creases of harsh, humorous lines that would disappear from her face the moment she stopped. _Lost?_ she mouthed.

Miss Moore lifted her lantern closer to her face, and the realism of the light warded away the illusion. She reminded herself that she was here not to torture herself but to discover what Gemma Doyle may or may not know about her heritage. Surely, she was interested. She had never seen the girl look so alive. When alight, her green eyes recalled her mother, that dangerously exposed expression. _Teach me, tell me, show me, love me. _

So she told her the story of the Order. Not "us." There was no "us" anymore, no "my sisters," and "I" had certainly died in a fire long ago. "The Order," she said. They_ were a powerful group of sorceresses. _They_ had access to a mystical world beyond this one._ Not her, never her.

Gemma Doyle bent her head and reached beneath her high collar for the chain of a necklace. She lacked Mary's grace, but in that simple gesture, she was there, dressing for vespers in their room, baring her body shyly, like some great and shameful secret. _Here is my beauty, _she seemed to say, eyes downcast. Gemma Doyle looked up, and the shape of the crescent eye shone, silver, against her heart. It was as if the charm had robbed the lanterns of their radiance. The girls' faces and the foreboding goddesses flickered and vanished. Miss Moore was left alone to chase the moon.

"Yes, that's it, all right," Miss Moore managed in a constricted voice, as soon as the world came back into focus. _Eugenia's necklace. _She felt she had to touch it. Eugenia could not deny her now of this small consolation, the momentary caress of a hollow symbol of a greater power. If she could not have it, she would scrounge and struggle for a piece of its shadow.

Miss Doyle's expression was desperate in its hope and pain as she listened to her. So sad and so unjust. She didn't want this power. She would give it away in an instant, if only she could. She wanted only idyllic normalcy, just like her mother, four children and a fat, wealthy husband, no doubt. She had nothing to escape from in this world. She didn't understand what her costume jewelry was worth.

"Suppose a person was without the necklace—without its protection," Gemma asked, words flying from her lips in a frenzy. "What would happen to her?"

_Oh, perhaps, supposedly, so I have heard, that's an interesting story, if I can remember my folklore correctly … the shadows would find her and, envious, carry away all of her light like common thieves. Perhaps, or so the legend goes, she would rather die than reconcile with her old friend and share with her the pale circle of that small spotlight. Perhaps. I must have read it somewhere._

Miss Moore saved herself Gemma Doyle's increasingly frantic questions with a single cold dismissal. _It's an ancient legend, ladies, bound, fictional, and unattainable, buried in libraries that reek of rotting parchment. It's all a lie, really. Listen to sense. The creature killed your mother._

Out of lack of anything else to do, Miss Moore dug through her canvas bag. Her hand brushed a smooth circle of warm metal. She wrapped the long chain around her fingers and drew out the pocket watch.

People always regarded her strangely when they asked for the time. They found the man's pocket watch off-putting in a woman's hand. _Oh, how little they knew_. But they were right in essentials, if for entirely the wrong reason. It was indeed a strange thing— that the watch had come to be in her possession. It went against some law of nature and all reason. It shouldn't be hers. She shouldn't wear it close enough to warm the metal with the heat of her body. She shouldn't want it anywhere near.

That was the point, really, from the start. It was an act of defiance. The watch had fallen out of his pocket one night, and without thinking, she had taken it. Irrational, she knew. She could have put it to much better use than that. When the maid found it in the morning, everyone would want to know how his most prized possession had come to be in her bed. _And Miss Sarah, sleeping like an angel._ Or, better, an innocent child. Emma had been questioning him about the scratches on his arms lately. _Only the garden, dear,_ he claimed, but roses had thorns, not fingernails. Sarah, in all her former liveliness, had taken to falling asleep often during the day. Her famous temper flared at frivolities. She was listless, quiet, and easily startled. There was a knife missing from the kitchen. And that watch—gold, engraved, his father's—never left his sight. He flaunted it to exhaustion. _He hadn't worn it for weeks. Why had he not reported it missing_? If used correctly, it could have been her vindication. But her need to take something from him was stronger than her sense of reason. She cleaned it and hid it beneath her mattress. He missed it but knew better than to mention it. It made those nights easier somehow. In this bed, she too had taken something that belonged to him.

Eventually, it surpassed him. She was taking time back from him, those midnight hours, as if it was something reversible, something that could change hands. As the hands moved in endless circles around the clock face, they outlived him. They outlived his hands and his face. The time was hers now, and it moved forward, always in circles.

She checked the time and shut the watch. "It's almost time to go back," she told the motherless girl with the crescent eye hanging around her neck.


End file.
